While her sudden and bizarre questioning had unsettled him, it hadn’t been that alone that had prompted his sudden flight from the window. Rather, it had been a reflection he’d caught in the empty display window outside his room, specifically of a short, bald man waiting patiently out in the hallway with a handgun. Shawn had seen the man before: it was he who had come into Shawn’s room on his first night at the campus and brought him to Rachel. Though Shawn hadn’t seen him since then, he now wondered whether the man might not have been there all along, always just out of sight. It was certainly plausible. Shawn had never really known too much about what this surreal place was or what they were all doing here, and now he understood that he’d known even less than he’d thought.
If there was one thing of which he was certain, however, it was that if he had stayed in that room any longer and answered Rachel with anything other than what she wanted to hear, he probably would have wound up dead.
As he ran toward the trees, he heard Rachel scream out words that he would never be able to unhear: “Shoot him!”
Shots rang out from somewhere behind him, probably the window from which he’d jumped. He didn’t dare look back, and as he moved into the woods, he could hear a door swinging open somewhere behind him, followed by shouting and running feet. He went deeper into the trees and heard other sounds, more distant now. An engine revving up and, a few minutes later, what sounded an awful lot like a helicopter taking off somewhere in the distance. Was that possible? Who had a helicopter on the campus, and where had they been keeping it?
What the fuck was this place?
Shawn heard the sounds of rushing water and, before he knew it, found himself in the middle of a clearing. He recognized the spot right away, the old wire railing and behind it the cliff side overlooking the rushing river below, and he cursed his subconscious for having obviously led him there. Footsteps were coming up somewhere behind him. He moved toward the railing and peered down at the rushing water, as the footsteps grew louder and slower simultaneously. His pursuer, he knew, had exited the woods and was now right there in the clearing with him. Shawn didn’t turn around; his eyes remained fixed on the water. If it was deep enough, he might not break any bones. If it wasn’t, he’d probably splatter on impact.
Of course, it didn’t matter. As he well knew, he had only two options right now: jump, or worry about it and then jump.
“Don’t!” a voice called out, but Shawn swung himself over the barrier and leaped out into the open air. For a fraction of a second, it felt as though he were suspended midair, the Minnesotan nighttime frozen all around him, and then he was suddenly hurtling straight down toward the black water below, once again doing his best to keep his feet tucked in under himself. With a tremendous splash, he landed in the water, went under, and then broke the surface, gasping, a fiery pain shooting through his entire body. He screamed as he realized that in addition to being bent or broken, he was also badly cut. He tried to swim, but it was nearly impossible; both his right arm and left ankle were in excruciating pain. Water rushing at him from all sides, he went under again, then broke the surface once more, gasping, barely registering that, out of the corner of his eye, something else was now plummeting from above.
There was another tremendous splash, and had Shawn been less focused on not being swept under by the waves, he would have been both horrified and shocked that his pursuer had apparently leaped into the river after him. Barely conscious at this point, Shawn felt himself suddenly grabbed by the arm and pulled in close. He shut his eyes, everything slipping away, and when next he opened them, he was lying on his back on the riverbank, expelling water from his lungs in violent bursts. When he was done coughing, he lay there panting and looked up at the figure staring down at him, a dark shape silhouetted by the moonlight, a tall and wiry man with a shaved head and no discernible expression, though Shawn could only just barely make out his face.
It was a face he would have known anywhere.
“How…?” Shawn whispered, too weak to use his full voice. “You’re dead.”
The man moved his lips, but his response was drowned out by either the rushing river, the pounding in Shawn’s head, or both. It all made sense now, Shawn realized. He had never even survived that fall from the cliff. What he was seeing, this impossible hallucination, was his final vision, an echo from his life reverberating just below the surface of his fading consciousness.
Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe what he was seeing was real, the ghost of Andrew Leland, his lifelong hero, come to welcome Shawn into the great beyond. Except why would it be Leland and not his own mother? He was still wondering when the darkness once again overtook him.
CHAPTER 13
Shawn woke to a musky smell and the sound of rain. He opened his eyes, but everything was black, and when he tried to lift his head, he found that the muscles in his neck were too weak. Gradually, his eyes adjusted. He was in a dark, wood-paneled room, a cabin or shack. He tried again to lift his head, this time with more success, and was able to make out a dim figure sitting in a chair by a small window not far from the bed.
“Don’t try to move.”
That voice.
“You’re in bad shape,” the man continued, “and we won’t be able to stay here long.”
“It’s really you,” Shawn whispered. “Jesus, there’s so much I want to know.”
“Right now, I ask the questions,” Andrew Leland replied. “What did they tell you?”
“About what?”
“Everything.”
Shawn took a deep breath. His head was still fuzzy and his voice still weak, but he rallied whatever strength he had and did his best to explain. About how Rachel had lured him in with the fake letters supposedly written by him. About how she had told him about the history of Ambius and about Leland’s supposed death and about the imminent threat Earth now faced from another world. About the cosmic shield that Leland had originally been brought in to build and about Shawn’s own solution for generating enough exotic matter to build it and then about his escape out the dorm window once he’d realized that his life was in danger. When he was finished speaking, he was completely drained of energy and out of breath. He lay there, panting, waiting for Leland to respond.
After what felt like forever, Leland finally spoke.
“Your girl was smart. Fed you half-truths, reversals, and outright lies. First off, Earth is alone. Others did help us out once upon a time and gave us technology, but they stopped once they got to know us. Save for a few hired mercenaries who mostly gather intelligence, no one has had anything to do with this planet for decades—we’re the black sheep of space. Second, I never worked for Ambius, had never even heard of them before I was taken. But I was asked by someone else to build a protective shield, and I did. A cosmic wall made out of space-time curvature exactly like the one you described. Using magnetic fields like a particle accelerator, just like you guessed.”
“I don’t understand,” Shawn said, fighting his weariness, trying to stay focused. “If you already built the wall, what did Ambius need me for?”
Though he wasn’t looking at Leland and couldn’t have seen his face even if he was, Shawn had a faint sense that, in the pause before his response, Leland was smiling at his stupidity.
“To help them tear it down,” Leland answered. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”
As Shawn tried to make sense of what Leland had just said, in his weakened state, it seemed too difficult to process.
Or maybe he knew exactly what Leland meant and wasn’t ready to face it. He closed his eyes, willing himself back to sleep.
Leland watched him for a few moments. Then, when it was clear the boy was no longer conscious, he turned his attention to the window and to the star-filled night sky that could be glimpsed, beyond the treetops, from where he sat. In his right hand, he held Diego’s loaded pistol and in his left, the strawberry-sized crimson jewel.
He gripped it tightly, shut his eyes. It was his only physical conn
ection to her in this world, and though he hadn’t dreamed about her since leaving Spain weeks earlier, it seemed to him that tonight, he could feel her more strongly than ever.
He stared out at the stars above, and for the first time in ages, no doubt triggered by listening to this kid’s story, his mind was brought back to that fateful night nine years prior in Bernasconi Hills, the night the world learned it wasn’t alone, the night that changed him and everything else forever.
CHAPTER 14
Andrew Leland tried to scream, but no sound came out. Minutes before, a dimwitted newscaster named Bill Allenby had been asking him about an expanding green dot in the sky, and now the twinkling lights of San Bernardino and Indio and Los Angeles were getting smaller and smaller underneath him as all of Southern California began to look increasingly like a map. He couldn’t make anything out too well, though, his vision obscured by a surrounding prism of green light in the midst of which he was suspended and basically frozen. The air was cold and getting thinner, and soon breathing took priority over screaming until that too became impossible and he passed out.
When he awoke, he was lying in what seemed very much like a normal bed in what seemed very much like a normal bedroom, though one without any windows. Were it not for a constant vibration and a total lack of ambient noise, he might have thought he was emerging from another of the drunken one-night stands that had become routine since his split from Nancy.
He sat up and looked around. The walls, ceiling, and floor were off-white, blank, and utterly pristine. He noticed that he felt far too relaxed than he reasoned he should be, which he attributed either to shock or having possibly been drugged.
This is happening, he thought to himself, several times in a row. This is happening in real life, and it’s happening to me. But what was happening? There was a closed door. He stared at it, and, as if on cue, it opened, and a man suddenly entered the room.
Or, if not a man, something that very much resembled a man. From across the street, he could pass for one, though if anyone glanced for more than a few seconds, he or she would probably notice the unnatural fluidity of body movement that Leland was noticing now. And there was something else that was off, too, beyond the man’s movement, something vague and elusive but present nonetheless, a strange otherness that Leland could sense if he couldn’t quite name.
The figure approached the edge of the bed and looked at him, and Leland involuntarily shuddered. It was like making eye contact with a statue; there was nothing but emptiness, like peering into two glass eyes.
“You’re not real,” Leland said without meaning to speak.
The figure nodded.
“What are you?” Leland asked.
“I’m a representative. An avatar of your hosts.” Its voice was smooth and oddly casual sounding.
“Who are my hosts? Why am I talking to you and not them?”
“You’re not built to see or hear them,” the avatar responded. “If you experienced them directly, your senses would distort your perception, and communication wouldn’t be possible.”
“And they’re from another planet?”
“Yes.”
“Am I on some kind of a ship?”
“Yes.”
For a moment, Leland felt the slightest sensation of panic welling up from the pit of his stomach, but he took a breath and managed to calm himself.
“What do they want with me?”
“Your help.”
“My help? With what?”
“Your world is more dangerous than you know. And now your hosts’ world has become caught in your crosshairs. A secret collective of leaders and scientists on your planet has decided we have something they want, which they aim to take by force. While our civilization is far more advanced than yours, that is of limited utility in this case. For one thing, humanity’s capacity for wreaking destruction has always been wildly disproportionate to its scientific progress. For another, we don’t know how Earth might engage us, whether by a conventional attack, which could put our coveted possession in harm’s way, or by some form of theft that we might not anticipate. What we want is to become completely inaccessible to Earth.”
“And … how would you accomplish that?”
“A shield. Our engineers have been exploring the possibility of a special barricade, one that could warp the time and space surrounding our world so that any ship or weapon that tried to pass through would instead be redirected far into the distant past. This shield would therefore be not only physically impossible to penetrate but logically impossible. And we have lately become convinced, Andrew Leland, that it is your research and your mind that will provide the solution for making this idea become a reality.”
Leland wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. He knew to what research the avatar must be referring, and he had just barely gotten those mid-’90s papers on Alcubierre drives and Krasnikov tubes accepted by peer-reviewed journals. Meanwhile, some alien race had been huge fans?
But there was something else that confused him even more. “I don’t get it,” he said. “If your civilization is so much more advanced than my own, why would you need my help?”
And now, for the first time, the avatar smiled.
“You must understand that ‘advanced’ does not mean more intelligent or creative. To put it in terms you might appreciate, Mozart lived on your planet more than two centuries ago. Can anyone on your world today compose a symphony better than he could? Will anyone ever?
“We are not a race of artists or innovators. We are engineers. We’ve appropriated all our major innovations from other worlds, near and far. Your planet is not notably advanced, no, but your kind is remarkably creative, both for the good and the bad. And your work, Andrew Leland, is art. Your theories are the key to what we’ve been trying to achieve. We need you to build this barrier for us. We need you to compose our symphony.”
Leland struggled to take this all in. The situation seemed so unlikely and so unreal that he couldn’t really get his full bearings.
“You should know that you can’t survive on our planet as you are,” the avatar continued. “To help us, you have to become one of us. We can’t force you; the choice has to be yours alone.”
“Wait a minute,” Leland said, leaning forward as the reality of the situation suddenly began to crystallize for him. “You’re telling me you want me to come with you to your planet and live there and … work for you?”
“If you so choose, yes.”
Leland stared at this thing, this avatar, as though seeing it for the first time. He climbed out of bed and walked right up to it, saying nothing, and the avatar didn’t move or change its expression. He looked the machine over, circled it, examined it. It looked so much like a person but clearly wasn’t one, yet it didn’t look like a wax figure or a mannequin or a statue or anything else he’d ever seen. What struck him most of all was that strange otherness. It was almost as though it wasn’t exactly three dimensional, yet wasn’t less or more than that, either.
Could this all be a dream? he wondered.
No. You sometimes knew when you were dreaming, but you always knew when you weren’t.
Leland shut his eyes and reflected on the past fifteen years. At one time, he had been a cutting-edge scientist, one of his generation’s leading minds, a thinker at the forefront of new discoveries, of understanding and teaching others about how the universe truly works. Somehow, gradually and without consciously intending to do so, he’d receded from that identity and become something else with little resemblance to who he’d once been. And that was okay with him, most of the time. He liked going on TV, living in posh Silver Lake, bedding beautiful women … who wouldn’t? He’d accepted that this was how he was going to end his career, and it wasn’t a half-bad way to go out. In reality, that rush he used to get from scientific research, especially those rare eureka moments where you realize you’ve just made some new discovery or had some startling insight that could have major implications, that high was a thing of the p
ast, had been almost entirely forgotten by him at this point.
Almost.
Leland opened his eyes and gazed again upon this strange and wondrous machine, this avatar that was beseeching his help on behalf of an entire world. And he smiled to himself. How ironic, he thought, that it should believe it was asking a favor of him. For in Andrew Leland’s heart of hearts, he knew that this was not merely a chance to become a true scientist again. Nor could one accurately call it a great opportunity or even the opportunity of a lifetime.
This was, at the most conservative estimate, the opportunity of twenty lifetimes.
Leland gazed into the avatar’s eyes and into the cool nothingness that lay behind them.
“I’ll help you,” he said.
The avatar smiled. It stepped closer and removed from a pocket some kind of tiny thumbtack-like object, which it swiftly and without warning pressed into the flesh of Leland’s right arm. Immediately, Leland felt excruciating pain. His entire body started to burn and visibly whither, causing him to cry out.
Was he melting? Disintegrating? The pain was so enormous, so much more visceral and intense than any he’d ever known, he wondered if he had been tricked, if this was all some sort of trap. When would it stop? Would it ever stop?
“Don’t be concerned for your body,” the avatar said calmly. “You won’t need it anymore.”
Suddenly, the burning was replaced by something else, an entirely different sensation, incredible and pure, a feeling more exhilarating than any he’d ever experienced in his life. It was as though he could feel all of existence moving within and without himself. As though he was everything combined with everything.
As though his heart and the rhythm of the universe beat as one.
CHAPTER 15
The North Atlantic shimmered in the sunlight. Cecil, who seconds before had been laughingly insisting the water would look more turquoise once they were farther out from the beach, now bent forward, clutching his knee in agony, as Lopez and his fellow airmen looked on in shock.
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